Conditions at Butler Hospital part of a "pattern of intimidation and retaliation"

Hospital workers need fair contracts from Care New England

Steve Ahlquist

After nearly two months, the Butler Hospital workers’ unfair labor practice strike is now considered the longest hospital strike in Rhode Island history. On Wednesday, union workers from Butler and Women & Infants Hospital spoke out about Care New England (CNE) ’s sustained campaign of intimidation, harassment, and retaliatory behavior that affected caregivers and their patients.

Beth Iams, an activities therapist and mental health worker at Butler Hospital for the past 24 years, outlined a series of escalating CNE tactics against striking workers. “Our unfair labor practice strike began on May 15 at 6 am in the pouring rain,” said Iams. “Unfortunately, Butler Hospital and Care New England decided their strategy would be to use fear and intimidation to get us back to work.

“They started their campaign one week into the strike by canceling our health insurance as of June 1st. What were we going to do? We all need health insurance. For many of us, that was the start of the unity, strength, and resilience that we all possess today. Our union organized HealthSource Rhode Island to help our members find health insurance so we could all breathe again.

“Then we returned to the negotiating table, and Butler offered us less than they offered in the previous negotiations. This will do it, they thought. We will offer less, and they will break. But guess what? We didn’t break, right? We stayed unified and we kept going.

“Then they posted our jobs, taunting us with what they know means so much to all of us. Would we break then? No. Again, we relied on each other to get through those difficult times. The more they tried to break us, the closer we became. People who never spoke were now friends and people you could lean on.

“We finally felt a win. We were approved for unemployment by the Department of Health, who acknowledged that our strike was a lockout. What was Butler’s new plan? They filed a restraining order against the state to block our unemployment until an appeal was heard. This appeal usually takes 30 to 45 days, so they wanted to block our unemployment payments until that appeal was heard. They went before a judge and explained how paying us unemployment would be a hardship for them.

“Fortunately, the judge decided they would not grant the restraining order, and they lifted the hold on our unemployment benefits. That was a huge win for us. But guess what Care New England’s latest tactic is? They’re appealing this decision to the Rhode Island Supreme Court. Regardless of what they throw at us, we stay strong. Their intimidation efforts are failing. We will not take less than we deserve. The only way to end this is to give us the fair contract we need for ourselves, our families, and our patients.”

The press conference/rally was outside Women & Infants’ Hospital at 101 Dudley Street in Providence. Here’s the video: Amid longest hospital strike in RI history CNE workers outline pattern of intimidation & retaliation

On May 15, Women & Infants announced it would lay off at least nine essential workers during one of the birthing facility’s busiest seasons. This includes eliminating the entire Pre-Admission Testing (PAT) department, which plays the vital role of pre-interviewing patients before surgery to ensure none of their current medications will result in complications.

Sure, let's agree to disagree

Trump reveals his actual plan on tariffs

For what it's worth, here's what he said about his stated goal of getting "90 deals in 90 days" with US trading partners.

Donald Trump on July 7:

"Oh, we’ve spoken to everybody. We know every. It’s all done. I told you. I told you we’ll make some deals, but for the most part we’re gonna send a letter. 

We’re gonna say, ‘Welcome to the United States. If you’d like to participate in the greatest, most successful country ever.’ I mean, we’re doing better than ever. We have. I don’t think. 

And you’re gonna see these numbers soon. We’ve never had numbers like this. We’ve never had investment like this. 

Uh, we have more than 90. We’re gonna have much more than 90. But most of those are gonna be sent a letter. This is exactly what I said. 

Now, we’ve made a deal with United Kingdom. We’ve made a deal with China. We’ve made a deal. We’re close to making a deal with India. 

Others, we’ve met with, and we don’t think we’re gonna be able to make a deal. So, we just send them a letter. ‘Do you wanna, do you wanna play ball? This is what you have to pay.’ 

So, we’re, as far as I’m concerned, we’re done. 

We’re sending out letters to various countries, telling them how much tariffs they have to pay. 

Some will maybe adjust a little bit depending if they have a, you know, cause. We’re not gonna be unfair about it. 

And actually, it’s a small fraction compared to what we should be getting. We should be. We could be asking for much more. 

But for the sake of relationships that we’ve had with a lot of really good countries, we’re doing the way I do it. But we could be getting a lot more. We could ask for a lot more than what we’re asking for.”

State funds green energy projects at local farms

Farmers in Charlestown, Westerly and South Kingstown among the grantees

Bee Happy Homestead in Charlestown is one of the grantees

The Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management (DEM) awarded more than $400,000 in funding to support 23 agricultural businesses across the state. 

These grants, distributed over the last two rounds of the Agricultural Energy Grant Program, will help farms invest in clean energy, lower utility costs, and advance the state’s climate goals.

“The Agricultural Energy Program supports farms in pursuing both energy efficiency and renewable energy upgrades,” said Acting Energy Commissioner Chris Kearns. “These grants help advance our Act on Climate goals while lowering energy bills for Rhode Island’s farmers.”

“The most recent USDA Census of Agriculture ranked Rhode Island as having the highest percentage of beginning farmers in the nation, and our goal is to continue that growth by ensuring the long-term viability of our state’s agriculture,” said DEM Director Terry Gray. “These grants will enable 10 of those farms to adopt energy-saving practices while continuing to grow a vibrant network of new farmers.” 

Grant Recipients

Barrington: Bayside Apiary — $20,000 

A family-run beekeeping operation with more than 80 hives adjacent to the Barrington Community Garden. This 8.72 kW solar expansion builds on an existing system and will fully power their climate-controlled honey processing facility.

Charlestown: Bee Happy Homestead — $20,000 

Owned by master gardeners, this farm grows produce, raises bees, and crafts bath products. A 6.02 kW solar system will offset 81% of its electricity use.

Natural Compound in Fruit and Vegetables Found To Slash Heart Disease and Diabetes Risk

Tasty way to good health

By American Society for Nutrition

Heart disease and type 2 diabetes are two of the leading causes of death and long-term health problems in the United States. Now, a new study highlights how eating more plant-based foods could make a real difference. Specifically, researchers have identified a compound in plants that may help lower your risk of both conditions.

The compound is called phytosterol. It is found naturally in foods like fruits, vegetables, nuts, and whole grains, and it has a structure similar to cholesterol.

According to the study, people who consumed more phytosterol had a significantly lower risk of developing heart disease and type 2 diabetes. Those with higher intake also showed signs of better blood sugar control, less inflammation, and even changes in their gut bacteria that may support a healthier metabolism.

The Supreme Court upholds free preventive care, but its future now rests in RFK Jr.’s hands

Cold comfort

Paul Shafer, Boston University and Kristefer Stojanovski, Tulane University

The Affordable Care Act has survived its fourth Supreme Court challenge.
 Ted Eytan via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

On June 26, 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a 6-3 ruling that preserves free preventive care under the Affordable Care Act, a popular benefit that helps approximately 150 million Americans stay healthy.

The case, Kennedy v. Braidwood, was the fourth major legal challenge to the Affordable Care Act. The decision, written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh with the support of Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor, ruled that insurers must continue to cover at no cost any preventive care approved by a federal panel called the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force.

Members of the task force are independent scientific experts, appointed for four-year terms. The panel’s role had been purely advisory until the ACA, and the plaintiffs contended that the members lacked the appropriate authority as they had not been appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. The Supreme Court rejected this argument, saying that members simply needed to be appointed by the Health and Human Services Secretary – currently, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – which they had been, under his predecessor during the Biden administration.

This ruling seemingly safeguards access to preventive care. But as public health researchers who study health insurance and sexual health, we see another concern: It leaves preventive care vulnerable to how Kennedy and future HHS secretaries will choose to exercise their power over the task force and its recommendations.

The Trumpist majority closed the term with a ruling that could rip the nation apart.

A corrupted Supreme Court sinks to new lows

Lisa Needham

With another Supreme Court term having drawn to a close, the rest of us begin the hard work of living under the profoundly anti-democratic decisions issued by the Court’s right-wing majority.

To be fair, under Chief Justice John Roberts, the conservative justices were rolling back civil rights and rewarding powerful interests long before Donald Trump descended his golden escalator in 2015. But the MAGA era — and the three Trump appointees to the Court — has resulted in a new, gruesome project: giving Trump whatever he wants.

This toxic combination of bigotry and fealty has created a Court that uses all its might to attack the less powerful while coddling those who already have it all — particularly Donald Trump.

It’s a Court with a very clear vision of who matters and who needs protection.

A dystopian interpretation of the Constitution

The majority opinion in Trump v. CASA, the birthright citizenship case, was honestly inevitable, a culmination of all the ways in which the conservative justices have warped the Court in order to serve Trump. Indeed, the Court’s previous term will go down in infamy as the one in which they gave Trump a permission slip to do whatever he wants by inventing sweeping presidential immunity.

One year later, Trump needed his reliable pals on the Supreme Court to step in on the birthright citizenship case because four federal district courts and three federal appeals courts had enjoined him from implementing his executive order eliminating birthright citizenship. That shouldn’t be a surprise, or even remotely controversial. 

There’s simply no world where an executive order can undo the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship, and since the order was so obviously unconstitutional, the lower courts issued universal, or nationwide, injunctions to block the policy.

Those nationwide injunctions stopped Trump from stripping citizenship from babies, even in states that were eager to let him do so. Twenty conservative states filed an amicus brief urging the Court to let Trump’s executive order go into effect.

But the conservatives on the Court didn’t feel like grappling with whether Trump’s executive order was unconstitutional. Indeed, they very much want you to know that the administration’s requests did not ask the Court to rule on the birthright citizenship issue at all. Heavens, no. This is just about whether lower courts can issue universal, or nationwide, injunctions.

This is, to put it charitably, a self-serving lie, a way for the conservatives to soothe themselves, to pretend they aren’t responsible for Trump turning the immense machinery of his immigration crackdown on literal babies. No, all they did was strip the lower courts of the ability to issue universal injunctions. Of course, once those injunctions are narrowed, the administration is free to get started on its plans to deprive babies of citizenship anywhere the narrower injunctions don’t apply.

Grain of assault

July 12: Bluegrass at the General Stanton

Brown University researchers discover how people gossip without getting caught

We sometimes do it in our sleep

By Gretchen Schrafft, Science Communications Specialist, Robert J. & Nancy D. Carney Institute for Brain Science, Brown University

Cognitive neuroscientists at Brown University investigated one of humanity’s favorite pastimes and discovered how people can spread gossip without the subject of that gossip finding out — at least not right away.

In a study supported by a federal grant from the National Science Foundation, the researchers found that gossiping relies on a person’s ability to perform complex computational processes each time they decide to spread information, and that most people do this instinctively. 

EDITOR'S NOTE: Brown University has been stripped of much of its federal research funding, so much so that it is imposing severe cost-cutting measures. As of June 30, Higher Ed reports that $45 million has not been paid to Brown by the National Institutes of Health for work already performed.  -  Will Collette

‘MAHA Report’ Calls for Fighting Chronic Disease, but Trump and Kennedy Have Yanked Funding

Shocked! SHOCKED! That Bobby Junior has reneged on his promise

David Hilzenrath 

The Trump administration has declared that it will aggressively combat chronic disease in America.

Yet in its feverish purge of federal health programs, it has proposed eliminating the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion and its annual funding of $1.4 billion.

That’s one of many disconnects between what the administration says about health — notably, in the “MAHA Report” that Donald Trump recently presented at the White House — and what it’s actually doing, scientists and public health advocates say.

Among other contradictions:

• The report says more research is needed on health-related topics such as chronic diseases and the cumulative effects of chemicals in the environment. But the Trump administration’s mass cancellation of federal research grants to scientists at universities, including Harvard, has derailed studies on those subjects.
• The report denounces industry-funded research on chemicals and health as widespread and unreliable. But the administration is seeking to cut government funding that could serve as a counterweight.
• The report calls for “fearless gold-standard science.” But the administration has sowed widespread fear in the scientific world that it is out to stifle or skew research that challenges its desired conclusions.

“There are many inconsistencies between rhetoric and action,” said Alonzo Plough, chief science officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a philanthropy focused on health.

The report, a cornerstone of Donald Trump’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda, was issued by a commission that includes Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other top administration officials.

News organizations found that it footnoted nonexistent sources and contained signs that it was produced with help from artificial intelligence. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt described the problems as “formatting issues,” and the administration revised the report.

Trump ordered the report to assess causes of a “childhood chronic disease crisis.” His commission is now working on a plan of action.

Spokespeople for the White House and Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to questions for this article.

Richmond approves town budget by a healthy margin

What’s Driving the Republican Party to Climate Murder-Suicide?

At what point will the body count become intolerable for them?

William Debuys for TomDispatch

In the annals of national suicide, the present dismantling of the American state will surely rank high. It may not reach the apogee attained by Russia in its final Tsarist days or by Louis XVI in the run-up to the French Revolution, but Great Britain’s Brexit hardly smolders compared to the anti-democratic dumpster fire of the Trump regime. 

Countless governmental, scientific, educational, medical, and cultural institutions have been targeted for demolition. The problem for the rest of the world is that the behavior of Trumpian America is more than suicidal—it’s murderous.

The deaths are mounting. By one accounting, the disruption of overseas food and drug shipments from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), including life-saving HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria treatments, has already caused nearly 350,000 deaths (and they continue at an estimated rate of 103 per hour). 

Here at home, cuts to Medicaid, as contemplated in the absurdly named “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” would lead to more than 21,600 avoidable deaths annually. And those numbers pale next to the levels of mortality expected to arise from the effects of climate change—a worsening catastrophe that the Trump regime is dead set against doing anything about. Indeed, with an array of policies under the rubric “Drill, baby, drill,” President Donald Trump and his officials seem intent on worsening matters as quickly as possible.

Worrying about how future generations will cope with a savagely inhospitable climate is for losers.

If the World Economic Forum is to be believed, deaths from flood, famine, disease, and other nonmilitary consequences of a hotter, more violent global climate might reach 580,000 per year, or 14.5 million by 2050. And that may be a lowball estimate, according to the American Security Project. Its models assert that warming-induced fatalities are already running at 400,000 annually and are heading for 700,000.

Any way you cut it, that’s a lot of misery. Given that the Trump regime is opening new areas for drilling; aggressively curtailing funding for climate-related programs; purging mention of climate change from government websites and publications; and disassembling the government’s capacity to track, let alone predict climate-change impacts, it makes sense to wonder WHY?

Over 70 percent of the immigrants kidnapped by ICE have no criminal record. Some are even U.S. citizens.

A Nation of Immigrants Under Attack

By Farrah Hassen

Across the country, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are tearing families apart, terrorizing communities, and upending businesses.

Mario Romero was among those arrested by ICE recently. His daughter, Yurien Contreras, witnessed ICE agents taking him “chained by the hands, feet, and waist” after they raided his workplace in Los Angeles. Over 40 other immigrant workers were also arrested.

“It was a very traumatic experience,” she told The Guardian. But “it was only the beginning of inhumane treatment our families would endure.”

The architect of this anti-immigrant agenda, top Trump aide Stephen Miller, has demanded that ICE make 3,000 arrests like these per day — an arbitrary quota with no legal basis.

To meet this quota, masked, plainclothes ICE agents embrace violent and unconstitutional tactics to abduct people from courthouses, citizenship appointments, churches, graduations, restaurants, Home Depots, farms, and other workplaces. They arrest people without warrants or probable cause, violate their right to due process, and deny them their basic human dignity.

There’s mounting evidence of ICE using racial profiling. “We have U.S. citizens who are being asked for their documents and not believed when they attest to the fact that they are U.S. citizens,” said Angelica Salas, who directs the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights. “They just happen to be Latino.”

In one disturbing case in Chicago, ICE agents grabbed, handcuffed, and forced Julio Noriega into a van as he stepped out of a Jiffy Lube in late January. ICE detained him for 10 hours before releasing him when they realized he was a U.S. citizen.

In another instance, ICE forced two children, who are both U.S. citizens — one undergoing Stage 4 cancer treatment — onto their mother’s deportation flight to Honduras in April. The cancer patient is four years old — and ICE deported him without his medication.

The inhumane treatment continues in ICE’s sprawling network of private prisons and county jails.

I vote for this

 

Scientific American chart on vaccines recommended for adults

 Save your life, get your shots!

New research suggests cat and dog ‘moms’ and ‘dads’ really are parenting their pets – here’s the evolutionary explanation why

Why we love our furry babies

Shelly Volsche, Boise State University

What's not to love? (photo by Will Collette)

Have you noticed more cats riding in strollers lately? Or bumper stickers that read, “I love my granddogs”? You’re not imagining it. More people are investing serious time, money and attention in their pets.

It looks an awful lot like parenting, but of pets, not people.

Can this kind of caregiving toward animals really be considered parenting? Or is something else going on here?

I’m an anthropologist who studies human-animal interactions, a field known as anthrozoology. I want to better understand the behavior of pet parenting by people from the perspective of evolutionary science. After all, cultural norms and evolutionary biology both suggest people should focus on raising their own children, not animals of a completely different species.

More child-free people, more pet parents

The current moment is unique in human history. Many societies, including the U.S., are experiencing major changes in how people live, work and socialize. Fertility rates are low, and people have more flexibility in how they choose to live their lives. These factors can lead people to further their education and value defining oneself as an individual over family obligations. With basics taken care of, people can focus on higher order psychological needs like feelings of achievement and a sense of purpose.

The scene is set for people to actively choose to focus on pets instead of children.

In earlier research, I interviewed 28 self-identified child-free pet owners to better understand how they relate to their animals. These individuals pointedly shared that they had actively chosen cats and dogs instead of children. In many cases, their use of parent-child relational terms – calling themselves a pet’s “mom” for instance – was simply shorthand.

They emphasized fulfilling the species-specific needs of their dogs and cats. For example, they might fulfill the animal’s need to forage by feeding meals using a food puzzle, while most children are fed at the table. These pet owners acknowledged differences in the nutrition, socialization and learning needs of animals versus children. They were not unthinkingly replacing human children with “fur babies” by treating them like small, furry humans.

Other researchers find similar connections, showing that child-free pet owners perceive their companions as emotional, thinking individuals. This way of understanding the mind of the animal helps lead to the development of a parent identity toward companion animals. In other cases, uncertain individuals find their need to nurture sufficiently fulfilled by caring for pets, cementing their fertility decisions to remain child-free.

Bobby Junior Eliminates CDC Staff Who Made Sure Birth Control Is Safe for Women at Risk

Safety last

Rachana Pradhan

For Brianna Henderson, birth control isn’t just about preventing pregnancy.

The Texas mother of two was diagnosed with a rare and potentially fatal heart condition after having her second child. In addition to avoiding another pregnancy that could be life-threatening, Henderson has to make sure the contraception she uses doesn’t jeopardize her health.

For more than a decade, a small team of people at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention worked to do just that, issuing national guidelines for clinicians on how to prescribe contraception safely for millions of women with underlying medical conditions — including heart disease, lupus, sickle cell disease, and obesity. But the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the CDC, fired those workers as part of the Trump administration’s rapid downsizing of the federal workforce.

It also decimated the CDC’s larger Division of Reproductive Health, where the team was housed — a move that clinicians, advocacy groups, and fired workers say will endanger the health of women and their babies.

Clinicians said in interviews that counseling patients about birth control and prescribing it is relatively straightforward. But for women with conditions that put them at higher risk of serious health complications, special care is needed.

Homeland Security boss Kristi Noem Secretly Took a Cut of Political Donations

Shocked! Simply shocked that ICE Barbie might be corrupt!

By Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan and Alex Mierjeski for ProPublica

In 2023, while Kristi Noem was governor of South Dakota, she supplemented her income by secretly accepting a cut of the money she raised for a nonprofit that promotes her political career, tax records show.

In what experts described as a highly unusual arrangement, the nonprofit routed funds to a personal company of Noem’s that had recently been established in Delaware. 

The payment totaled $80,000 that year, a significant boost to her roughly $130,000 government salary. Since the nonprofit is a so-called dark money group — one that’s not required to disclose the names of its donors — the original source of the money remains unknown.

Noem then failed to disclose the $80,000 payment to the public. After Donald Trump selected Noem to be his secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, she had to release a detailed accounting of her assets and sources of income from 2023 on. She did not include the income from the dark money group on her disclosure form, which experts called a likely violation of federal ethics requirements.

Experts told ProPublica it was troubling that Noem was personally taking money that came from political donors. In a filing, the group, a nonprofit called American Resolve Policy Fund, described the $80,000 as a payment for fundraising. The organization said Noem had brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars.

There is nothing remarkable about a politician raising money for nonprofits and other groups that promote their campaigns or agendas. What’s unusual, experts said, is for a politician to keep some of the money for themselves.

Donald Trump's niece says his only god is himself

Faith, hypocrisy, and the dangers of following a false prophet

From The Good in Us by Mary L. Trump | Mary L Trump | Substack

Donald has been even more erratic than usual lately, which is saying something, launching us into an illegal, unconstitutional, and unauthorized conflict with Iran and leaving everyone, including his own allies, waiting for his next move. But now he's invoking a new power in order to excuse his behavior — a God he does not believe in. Donald shocked the world by dropping bombs on Iran on Saturday after claiming two days earlier that he'd take two weeks to think about how to proceed. In his speech after launching the unprovoked attack, he invoked God multiple times:

“I want to just thank everybody, and in particular, God. I want to just say we love you, God, and we love our great military. Protect them. God bless the Middle East. God bless Israel. And God bless America. Thank you very much. Thank you.”

The backlash was swift. First of all, invoking religion to justify any bombing is offensive, but in the context of bombing a Middle Eastern country it smacks of the Crusades. 

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, took it one step further when, at the end of his remarks, he said “We give glory to God for His providence and continue to ask for His protection.” Whether Hegseth is a genuinely religious person I do not know, and I would prefer government officials not to speak in such terms about missile strikes. But Donald, despite his occasional attempts to pretend otherwise, is not religious at all.

Only $99 but if you want one with his signature
on a label, it's $1,000!

When he was a kid in the 1950s, Norman Vincent Peale was hugely popular. Peale was pastor of Marble Collegiate Church in midtown Manhattan and his shallow message of self-sufficiency appealed enormously to my grandfather, Fred. Peale was a charlatan, but he was a charlatan who headed up a rich and powerful church in New York City and he had a message to sell. 

My grandfather was not a reader, but it was impossible not to know about Peale’s bestseller, The Power of Positive Thinking. The title alone was enough for Fred, and he decided to join Marble Collegiate Church. He and his family rarely attended, but Fred already had a positive attitude and unbounded faith in his abilities to succeed. He didn't really need to read “the power of positive thinking” in order to co-opt, for his own purposes, the most superficial and self-serving aspect of Peale’s message.

Peale anticipated the prosperity gospel and his doctrine proclaimed that one need only have self-confidence in order to prosper in the way God wants one to. He wrote, “Obstacles are simply not permitted to destroy your happiness and well-being. You need to be defeated only if you are willing to be.”

Peale’s view neatly confirmed what my grandfather already thought: he was rich because he deserved to be. 

Living Hell

July 11: Summer Music Series at the Wilcox Tavern

Women Folk summer music series continues with Maddie Cardoza, Mary Pierce and Margi Gianquinto

By Women Folk

Friday, July 11 · 7 - 8:30pm EDT. Event lasts 1 hour 30 minutes

Women Folk Events began a few months ago at The Bend/Wilcox Tavern the 2nd FRIDAY of every month featuring fantastic songwriters from RI, CT and MA.

Get tickets HERE.

Charlestown's Earth Care Farms expands with a great new project

Abandoned Connecticut Quarry to be Transformed Into Soil Farm

By Frank Carini / ecoRI News staff

Jayne Merner with her father, Mike, and Birdie at
Earth Care Farm’s Connecticut site.
(Sterling Tougas)

The first family of Rhode Island composting, in search of land to expand their 48-year operation, wound up across the border in the Constitution State.

Jayne Merner, daughter of Mike, the founder of Charlestown, R.I.-based Earth Care Farm, recently told ecoRI News the decision to move to Connecticut was based on land availability, lack of neighbor pressure, and costs. She also said the search was narrowed because they didn’t want to use “good land” and they didn’t want to cut down trees.

They found just the spot, on Newport Road in this small Windham County town. The former gravel pit in northeastern Connecticut was just what the second-generation compost farmer was searching for. 

The 241-acre site needs plenty of work, but the transformation from abandoned gravel yard that features cornfields lost to meadows of mugwort and a cemetery of rocks of all shapes and sizes will begin on 14 acres at the property’s entrance.

For nearly five decades, the Merner family, led by Mike, has played the role of an organic alchemist, making a living turning zoo and stable manure, wood chips, leaves, straw shavings, seaweed, fish guts, coffee grounds, and food scrap into soil.

This nutrient-rich compost helps meet the needs of New England farmers looking for soil enrichment. The Earth Care Farm operation currently generates about 5,000 cubic yards annually of compost certified by the Organic Materials Review Institute. Some 25,000 tons of yard debris, manures, and food scrap is processed to make that compost.

The benefits of organic compost include increased soil fertility, better balanced soil pH, and improved chemical makeup of the soil. It also creates a healthy habitat for microorganisms, and increases drainage, aeration, and the water-holding capacity of soil — all factors that help plants better withstand weather extremes and disease.

Earth Care Farm’s existing composting operation in southern Rhode Island uses 3 acres for its six-stage compost production process and employs four full-time staff and seasonal help.

Merner noted that, with a customer base of 5,000 regional growers, demand has increasingly exceeded production capacity. Hence, the search for more room.

Pancreatic cancer vaccines eliminate disease in preclinical models

Hope for a disease that is usually a death sentence provided Trump-RFK Jr. don't kill the research

By Case Western Reserve University. Edited by Sadie Harley, reviewed by Robert Egan

(National Cancer Institute)

Pancreatic cancer has a five-year survival rate of just 13%, making it the deadliest cancer, according to the American Cancer Society. It typically causes no symptoms until it has already metastasized. Surgery, radiation and chemotherapy can extend survival, but rarely provide a cure.

Now, researchers at Case Western Reserve University and Cleveland Clinic are developing vaccines targeting pancreatic cancer that could eliminate the disease, leaving a patient cancer-free. So far, the vaccines have achieved dramatic results in studies with preclinical models.

Biomedical engineer Zheng-Rong (ZR) Lu has been elated by the response in preclinical models of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), the most common form of the disease.

"Pancreatic cancer is super aggressive," said Lu, the M. Frank Rudy and Margaret C. Rudy Professor of Biomedical Engineering in the Case School of Engineering. "So it came as a surprise that our approach works so well."

More than half were completely cancer-free months later, a result he said he hadn't seen before.

10 nasty little surprises in Trump's Big Beautiful Boondoggle

Zeros out Planned Parenthood, boosts Medicaid AND Medicare costs, squeezes student loan holders, gives venture capitalists a new tax break and more

By Colin Seeberger, Andrea Ducas and Natasha Murphy

Congressional Republicans passed a radical budget and tax bill—the One Big Beautiful Bill Act—on a party-line vote. Many of the plan’s key elements will increase families’ costs for health care, food, and utilities—such as historic cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) as well as terminating tax credits to produce more American-made energy—and are deeply unpopular according to recent survey data. Several provisions, however, remain less understood because they’ve received less media attention or were added during rushed negotiations that took place overnight and behind closed doors.

This article details several lesser-known provisions of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) that will increase costs and limit Americans’ ability to meet their basic needs; create a slush fund for Trump administration overreach; and waste taxpayer money.

Defunding Planned Parenthood clinics

The OBBBA includes a provision that would effectively defund Planned Parenthood clinics for one year. The bill would do this by prohibiting any health clinic that provides abortion care (even if that care is paid for privately) from accepting Medicaid funds for any other service they provide.

The Hyde Amendment already prohibits federal funds—including Medicaid dollars—from being used to cover abortion. This bill would go even further and prevent women on Medicaid from accessing any Planned Parenthood services, including sexually transmitted infection (STI) screening, Pap smears, breast cancer screenings, and prenatal care. 

This would be exceptionally harmful to Medicaid enrollees, as the majority of people with Medicaid receive contraceptives (85 percent) and STI services (57 percent) from Planned Parenthood clinics. Losing Medicaid funding would put 1 in 3 Planned Parenthood centers at risk of closure and would take away a vital source of health care for more than 1 million people.

Increasing health care costs for more than a million Medicare enrollees

While President Donald Trump has repeatedly promised not to cut Medicare benefits, the OBBBA blocks implementation of an existing regulation that makes it easier for eligible low-income Medicare beneficiaries to enroll in Medicare Savings Programs (MSPs) that lower Medicare premiums and out-of-pocket costs. 

MSPs make health care accessible for Medicare enrollees, who often live on very limited incomes and few assets. Without enrolling in the programs, even modest medical bills can be unaffordable and basic access to care can slip out of reach. Blocking the regulation would prevent states from streamlining and automating enrollment into MSPs.

As a result, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that the earlier House-passed bill (with similar provisions also in the Senate-passed bill) would cause 1.3 million Medicare enrollees eligible for these programs to lose or forgo their Medicaid coverage and, therefore, be unable to access the assistance. 

The Center for American Progress previously estimated that Medicare enrollees eligible for two MSP programs—the Qualified Medicare Beneficiary (QMB) Program and the Specified Low-Income Medicare Beneficiary (SLMB) Program—would be hit especially hard. These programs benefit Medicare enrollees living at or just above the federal poverty level (FPL). 

A couple on Medicare who are eligible for but no longer able to enroll in the QMB, making a combined $21,000 per year, could see their out of pocket costs skyrocket by $8,340. A single Medicare enrollee making only $19,000 per year and eligible for SLMB could see their out of pocket costs jump by $3,300 per year if they are unable to enroll in the program as a result of the bill.

States Fear Critical Funding From FEMA May Be Drying Up

Trump wants states to handle emergencies, but where's the money?

By Jennifer Berry Hawes for ProPublica

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem (a.k.a. "ICE Barbie) is
FEMA's boss and controls what they do

Upheaval at the nation’s top disaster agency is raising anxiety among state and local emergency managers — and leaving major questions about the whereabouts of billions of federal dollars it pays out to them.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency still has not opened applications for an enormous suite of grants, including ones that many states rely on to pay for basic emergency management operations. Some states pass on much of that money to their most rural, low-income counties to ensure they have an emergency manager on the payroll.

FEMA has blown through the mid-May statutory deadline to start the grants’ application process, according to the National Emergency Management Association, with no word about why or what that might indicate. The delay appears to have little precedent.

“There’s no transparency on why it’s not happening,” said Michael A. Coen Jr., who served as FEMA’s chief of staff under former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

FEMA’s system of grants is complex and multifaceted and helps communities prepare for and respond to everything from terrorist attacks to natural disasters.

In April, the agency abruptly rescinded a different grant program that county and local governments were expecting to help them reduce natural hazard risks moving forward. The clawback of money included hundreds of millions already pledged. FEMA also quietly withdrew a notice for states to apply for $600 million in flood mitigation grants.

On top of that, on June 11, U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem began requiring that she review all FEMA grants above $100,000. That could slow its vast multibillion grants apparatus to a crawl, current and former FEMA employees said.

Luckily, it's only Florida

 

Richmond voters urged to vote YES on budget

Privatizing Amtrak Would Be a Disaster

For Charlestown, it's the only way for the zombie Old Saybrook-Kenyon Bypass to rise again

Adam Barrington for Common Dreams

At a Senate Commerce subcommittee hearing earlier this month, former car salesman, wage thief, and current Ohio Sen. Bernie Moreno said the U.S. government should stop funding Amtrak, and argued in favor of handing it over to the private sector. Moreno and his ilk—including former White House dog, Elon Musk—perpetuate an old and tired right-wing tradition that is at best confused and at worst conniving: bashing all that serves the public good and venerating all that transfers wealth to private moneyed interests.

One might be tempted to give Moreno, Musk, and other practitioners of the ancient religion of market worship the benefit of the doubt; perhaps they really believe what they say. Maybe they truly think concentrating wealth and institutional control in the hands of a few corporate masters is what’s best for everyone. If that is the case, they are both far too bewildered, their minds far too infantile, to be in any positions of power and influence.

On the other hand, if Moreno and Musk are not in fact confused, then they must be aware that what they say is completely false. Privatization of public institutions has an observable record of raising prices for customers, diminishing service quality, and degrading working conditions. They know privatization is not good for the public, but it is good for private moneyed interests, like Moreno’s wealthy campaign contributors and billionaires like Musk, and that is what matters most to them.

For all the talk about Amtrak’s inefficiency, the record tells a different tale. Even with inadequate federal funding, Amtrak has made significant accomplishments. For example, though rail travel decreased during the Covid-19 pandemic, Amtrak set all-time records for ridership and revenue in FY24. In fact, Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor (NEC) ridership was 12% higher in FY24 than it was in FY19, before the pandemic struck, and the NEC’s FY24 operating cost recovery, at 123%, far exceeded the 100% statutory goal.

Speaking of efficiency—just how “efficient” is the private sector, anyway? Hack economists tell us that efficiency means getting the same or better results at a lower cost. A corporation gutting their workforce and skimping on maintenance to obtain higher profits is, by this logic, acting efficiently. The efficiency of a private business, therefore, depends on how much profit it can squeeze out of fewer workers, with cheaper materials, in worse conditions, and at greater risk to surrounding communities.

As Flood Deaths Rise, Texas Officials Blast Faulty Forecast by DOGE-Gutted National Weather Service

Predictable tragedy

Brett Wilkins for Common Dreams

As catastrophic flooding left scores of people dead and missing in Texas Hill Country and Donald Trump celebrated signing legislation that will eviscerate every aspect of federal efforts to address the climate emergency, officials in the Lone Star State blasted the National Weather Service—one of many agencies gutted by the Department of Government Efficiency—for issuing faulty forecasts that some observers blamed for the flood's high death toll.

The Associated Press reported Saturday that flooding caused by a powerful storm killed at least 27 people, with dozens more—including as many as 25 girls from a summer camp along the Guadalupe River in Kerr County—missing after fast-moving floodwaters rose 26 feet (8 meters) in less than an hour before dawn on Friday, sweeping away people and pets along with homes, vehicles, farm and wild animals, and property.

"The camp was completely destroyed," Elinor Lester, 13, one of hundreds of campers at Camp Mystic, told the AP. "A helicopter landed and started taking people away. It was really scary."

Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha said during a press conference in Kerrville late Friday that 24 people were confirmed dead, including children. Other officials said that 240 people had been rescued.

Although the National Weather Service on Thursday issued a broad flood watch for the area, Texas Division of Emergency Management Chief Nim Kidd—noting that the NWS predicted 3-6 inches of rain for the Concho Valley and 4-8 inches for the Hill Country—told reporters during a press conference earlier Friday that "the amount of rain that fell in this specific location was never in any of those forecasts."

"Listen, everybody got the forecast from the National Weather Service," Kidd reiterated. "You all got it; you're all in media. You got that forecast. It did not predict the amount of rain that we saw."

Kerrville City Manager Dalton Rice also said during the press conference that the storm "dumped more rain than what was forecasted" into two forks of the Guadalupe River.

Kerr County judge Rob Kelly told CBS News: "We had no reason to believe that this was gonna be anything like what's happened here. None whatsoever."

The New York Times reported this morning: 

Texas officials appeared to blame the Weather Service for issuing forecasts on Wednesday that underestimated how much rain was coming. But former Weather Service officials said the forecasts were as good as could be expected.... The staffing shortages suggested a separate problem, those former officials said — the loss of experienced people who would typically have helped communicate with local authorities in the hours after flash flood warnings were issued overnight.

Since January, the NWS—a branch of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)—has reduced its workforce by nearly 600 people as a direct result of staffing cuts ordered by the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, as part of Trump's mission to eviscerate numerous federal agencies.